What good fathers teach us

Yesterday was Father's Day 2021. I readily accept that there are many men who are father figures in our lives and I would like to take a minute and recall several such good men in my life.

Not to begin with overstatement but first and foremost we should remember Our Father in Heaven, God the Father. Without Him we are nothing in the most literal and figurative senses.

My own father, me Pops, I owe a debt I can never repay. He taught me a lot but perhaps the greatest lesson he taught me was that right is right and wrong is wrong. No morality is relative nonsense ever came from his lips.

I had two grandfathers who were almost polar opposites yet had great auras about them. Me Grandpa Joe showed me that you can be rough around the edges yet still sentimental and reverent. Me Grandpaw Hutchins displayed clearly to me that you can (and should) be calm and sober in dealing with others.

The Dominican Friars who staffed St. Dominic Church in Detroit gave me a sense of how to comport myself with charity (a lesson which I, sadly, still struggle over) while providing the intellectual background to understand Christianity.

It was an absolute delight to have Dr. Carlo Grassi as a philosophy instructor at the University of Detroit. It is most emphatically not hyperbole to say that my entire college education was worth the three courses I took with him. He was the first teacher who ever inspired me to want to know. His enthusiasm did not escape me; he actually apologized once for perhaps being too delighted with teaching and understanding good philosophy, with being able to know the well from the ill, the good from the bad. No apology necessary, my dear man.

Another instructor at U of D, Dr. Norbert Gossman, showed me a similar love of history which inspired me all the more to want to study and teach it. I actually had him for five classes, which was a bit odd as he was the European History instructor and I was majoring in American History. But you want, or you should want anyway, to sit at the feet of good teachers.

There are many other who taught me well in more individual ways and manners. I hope they forgive that I have no time to mention them here. But they are well remembered too.